I suspect it's because this site is mainly targeted towards technology and engineering, but somehow world news keeps making its way in here and people are getting bored of it
Everything nominally related to Trump is getting flagged, even comments. Several unrelated comments of mine went from neutral/positive to flagged suddenly. Salty folks, or maybe coordinated, probably a little of both.
The guidelines don’t completely rule out politics, and in this case the topic is of interest here since it dovetails with other political issues of long-running concern in the HN community: who owns devices with outside service dependencies, right to repair, etc. The question of whether someone who physically controls an ECM pod can configure it feels a lot like the question about whether John Deere can prevent a farmer from configuring their tractor’s software or an IoT vendor can shut down a service without providing an alternative.
One area where this is especially of interest is everyone considering their dependency on U.S. products. If you live in a country under military threat, questions like what happens if the first strike against Canada involved a malicious Chrome or Windows update or holding back a patch for a vulnerability the NSA wants to exploit is quite an interesting problem.
Given how pervasive politization has become this would suggest that strict adherence to any "politics is off-topic" rule would necessarily involve making the site permanently read-only.
The guidelines seem just vague enough to allow for suppression of topics that the oligarchs are touchy about while appearing reasonable. Tech is inherently political.
